Human Trials Underway In China For SARS Vaccine

da_foz writes "A SARS vaccine has begun human trials in Beijing. The vaccine was devoloped with the help of some open source software, a couple details about what was used can be found here. Here is an interesting quote from the second link: 'The Director of the Genome Sciences Centre, Dr. Marco Marra, said he personally requested that his name not be included on the patent application as the scientist who found the genetic sequence. "This stems largely from a personal belief that DNA sequence is a discovery as opposed to an invention and should not be patentable," he said.'"

Comments

Re:An interesting irony

[smoondog]

for a disease that has killed relatively few people (statistically speaking).

Yes, but it has the potential to be a very dangerous disease....

Gene patenting is outrageous

[Nomihn0]

I would liken it to the patenting of the value of pi. Imagine that. People could only use pi up to a certain significant digit because of a possible patent infringement. It is a derived, discovered, value. Genes, and pi, are simply observationsof the functioning of the universe. Unlike the similar JPEG problem, nothing in its own right is being created. Maybe entire synthetic genomes should be patentable, but certainly not any that occur naturally and are simply observed and decoded.

Re:Philosophically, all is discovery

[Feztaa]

Well, the main difference between discovery and invention is that a discovery is something that already existed, that you found. An invention is something you thought up, that nobody ever thought of before.

I support his claim that discoveries should not be patentable.